I am willing to believe that these abnormally clever little people, who read grown-up books so conspicuously in public, love their Shakespeares, and their Grecian histories, and their “Idylls of the King.” I have seen literature of the delicately elusive order, like “The Marble Faun,” and “Elsie Venner,” and “Lamia,” devoured with a wistful eagerness that plainly revealed the awakened imagination responding with quick delight to the sweet and subtle charm of mystery. But I am impelled to doubt the attractiveness of Thackeray to the youthful mind, even when I have just been assured that “Henry Esmond” is “a lovely story;” and I am still more skeptical as to Miss Austen’s marvelous hair-strokes conveying any meaning at all to the untrained faculties of a child. Can it be that our boys and girls have learned from Emerson and Carlyle not to wish to be amused? Or is genuine amusement so rare that, like Mr. Payn’s young friend, they have grown reconciled to a pretended sensation, and strive dutifully to make the most of it? Alas! such pretenses are not always the facile things they seem, and if a book is ever to become a friend to either young or old, it must be treated with that simple integrity on which all lasting amity is built. “Read, not to contradict and confute,” says Lord Bacon, “nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse;” and, in the delicate irony of this advice, we discern the satisfaction of the philosopher in having deprived the mass of mankind of the only motives which prompt them to read at all. FICTION IN THE PULPIT.